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Legendary bored-housewife-pleasing publisher Mills and Boon is planning to up the romantic ante with its first porn books.

The usual mildly risqué euphemisms of the famed throwaway lady-paperbacks, known for their ripping of bodices and tousling of hair and rumpling of sheets and such, will helplessly submit to a crashing wave of proper actual no-holes-barred sex filth with the arrival of the Spice range of titles. The Daily Mail coyly explains that the books will feature 'sex for enjoyment', presumably as opposed to sex for obligation, sex for routine or sex as grudging quid pro quo for fixing the dishwasher.

M&B marketing madam Claire Somerville points out that in the sexified new stories, "it doesn't have to be linked to an emotional connection between heroes and heroines". Yes, folks, it's what real honest-to-moistness porn is all about - the pure red hot thrill of mechanical dead-eyed coitus with someone you wouldn't actually piss on if they were on fire. At least, not unless it was their thing.

One of the first Spice books, several of which are already on sale in the US, bears the splendidly oblique title Spies, Lies and Naked Thighs*. The heroine, Breezy Malone (the name presumably culled from the character's childhood pet llama and the street she first lived on), is an FBI agent sent to seduce a terrorist. Unfortunately the plan backfires when the champagne she plans to pour down her outstretched leg into the miscreant's mouth, like Salma Hayek in From Dusk Til Dawn, is confiscated by airport security**. Oh, the irony. But then she'll have to be strip-searched, of course, so it's all good.

Upstanding gents Gerald Mills and Charles Boon founded the company in the chaste first decade of the 20th century, publishing tomes on watersports and crafts. The first sex scenes in Mills and Boons pulsated into print in the 1960s, after the lifting of the ban on D H Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover opened wide the don't be so disgusting door for all manner of textual intercourse.

The Blaze imprint of M&B has already been splurging tales of inter-racial girl-on-girl action and other racy material since 2001, so Spice will have to really break out the big guns to impress porn fans. The really big guns. The ones that go off everywhere. Etc.

Spies, Lies... and its naughty sisters will be oozing over to the UK in 2009. Meanwhile you can find it on Amazon.com, if you're one of those appalling deviants who looks for pornography online. ®

Bonknotes

* Not to be confused with the 1988 Ed Begley Jr outing of the same name.